‘No!’ he bawled. ‘Damn you, no!’ He hurried across to Ernst, fists balled, eyes blazing, while Miethe and the other engineers fanned out behind him,
They were going to protect the saucer, to keep the demolition team at bay, but when Ernst unholstered his pistol and aimed it at Schriever, Lieutenant Metz’s squad of SS troops raised their submachine guns and took aim on the hapless engineers.
Schriever froze where he stood, about four feet away from Ernst, and the engineers behind him did exactly the same.
‘Let the demolition team through,’ Lieutenant Metz said, ‘or suffer the consequences.’
The engineers looked around them, at that circle of submachine guns, then parted to let the demolition team approach the saucer. Schriever glanced over his shoulder, saw them unwinding the plunger cables, then looked back at Ernst, his dark eyes appalled.
‘My life’s work! We have to at least have the chance to correct what’s wrong with it. One more day... a few days at most... It’s too important to... No, you can’t do this!’
‘Shut up,’ Ernst snapped. ‘You damned fool.’ Then he cocked his raised pistol.
We want no witnesses of any kind, Wilson had said, unless they’re in the Antarctic...
That meant Schriever and Miethe and all the rest of these engineers. When the Schriever saucer, relatively useless, was blown up, they would all disappear as well.
Schriever’s eyes became wider. ‘You wouldn’t!’
‘We would and we will. The whole business ends here.’
He glanced over Schriever’s shoulder at the demolition team and saw the man in charge of the plunger preparing to lean on it.
‘Goodbye, Schriever,’ Ernst said.
The flying saucer exploded. No, it didn't – something else did – an eruption of silvery light, boiling smoke and geysering earth... right beside Schriever’s saucer.
Confused, Ernst hesitated. He saw Schriever ducking, squeezed the trigger, fired too late, and saw the Flugkapitän running away as the ground erupted around him.
The shells were whistling in from the east: Soviet shells, from the big guns. Then the soldier fell on the plunger – was thrown forward, in fact, on a wave of erupting soil – and Schriever’s saucer disappeared in a ball of fire that spat debris everywhere.
‘Damn!’ Ernst hissed as the engineers scattered and the SS guns started chattering. Then he sprinted straight into the chaos, trying to take aim at Schriever as he made his escape.
The SS troops were spreading out, firing wildly from the hip – not at the engineers, who were running across the field past the smouldering debris of the saucer, but back in the direction of the East Hall, to which Schriever was running. They were not firing at him but at the other men pouring out, most of them wearing civilian clothes but returning the gunfire.
Schriever saw them as well, since he was running toward them, and he turned left and cut across the hangar doors and just about made it.
A Soviet shell saved him, exploding right behind him, between the men who were running out of the East Hall and the SS troops firing at them.
Ernst managed one shot but missed. He was blinded briefly by flying soil, cursed and rubbed his stinging eyes, then saw the men who were wearing civilian clothes still running at him and firing on the move.
Czechoslovak patriots! he thought. Coming out of the factory! The Russians must be in Prague!
Then he caught a glimpse of Schriever cutting back across the field, heading with the other engineers in the general direction of Prague. The ground was erupting between them, shells exploding around the factory, but Ernst went after him anyway, because, given the Czechoslovak patriots, it was the only direction left to him.
The SS troops were holding their ground, spreading across the remains of the saucer, firing their submachine guns at the advancing resistance men while being cut down by bullets or blown apart in explosions.
A burning light erased all of it. An appalling roaring filled the world. Ernst was slapped by a wave of heat, the breath was sucked from his lungs, he was picked up and spun wildly in the air, and then grass and earth rushed at him. He plunged into a silent darkness, losing his senses.
Later, he heard a ringing sound... Eventually he opened his eyes to find himself on the ground, lying on the rim of a smouldering shell hole near a parked SS truck.
The battle had moved away from the East Hall. It was ending in the shell-torn field with the SS troops being massacred by the greater number of Czechoslovak patriots. The engineers, including Schriever and Miethe, were still running, much farther away, toward Prague.
Let Schriever talk about his flying saucer, Ernst thought, sitting upright and shaking his head from side to side to clear it.
It will become just another red herring. Another aid to confusion. It will suit us just fine.
He glanced carefully around him, looking for other resistance fighters, but saw only a clearing filled with the bodies of dead Czechs and Germans. After climbing to his feet, he checked himself for broken bones, found nothing to worry about, so clambered up into the troop truck, which, he was pleased to note, still had the key in the ignition. Turning the engine on, he drove across the grassy field to get away from the factory, which by now was almost certainly overrun. He managed to get to the road without being stopped.
From there he drove to the nearest Luftwaffe airfield, which luckily was still held by Germans. He pulled rank in order to commandeer a light plane, then ordered the reluctant pilot to fly him to the SS airport near Kiel.
When the plane had ascended, he looked down through the clouds at the pall of smoke hanging over Prague. Moving in on the city, like ants advancing in numerous lines toward their anthill, were long columns of Soviet tanks and men.
It was something to see.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Bradley was scared. He had been well trained for this by the OSS, had rehearsed it so many times, even making the goddamned jumps, but now that it was real and he was doing it with the professionals – worse, in pitch darkness and in the middle of a war zone – he was not as confident as he had been during his training.
He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to go. His heart missed a beat and he looked along the aircraft, through that dim light, and saw the men of the 82nd Airborne Division facing one another in the belly of the plane, looking bulky with their parachutes and helmets, not frightened at all.
Well, certainly not showing it, as he was convinced he was doing. His heart was racing and he was sweating, though his hands felt too cold, and he knew that the urge to have a piss was also due to his fear.
He was fifty years old, for Chrissakes, and shouldn’t be doing such things!
He tried to forget what was going to happen by thinking instead of Gladys, who had continued to write her wonderful, witty letters from her sickbed in a hospital in London. Apparently she had been shipped back to London from Paris, was making a good recovery, and would soon be walking again, but she badly missed having him in bed beside her. She had also informed him, by letter, that she had scribbled his name about fifty or sixty times on the plaster cast on her broken leg and all the nurses, doctors, and visitors now knew who he was.
Goddammit, he loved her. She certainly made him feel good. Thinking about her made his heart race. It raced even more when he looked again at his wristwatch and realized that the jump would soon be starting.
Closing his eyes, he breathed deeply, trying to steady his racing heart, and saw, as he had so often since that one visit, the gallows and crematoria of Buchenwald, the priest’s gaunt, haunted face.
He had gone back to the priest, feeling trapped in a web of horror, and had learned a lot more from him about life in the concentration camps and underground factories. The priest had told him about the beatings, about the all-too-public hangings, about the shots to the back of the neck and the daily gassings and burnings. He had also told him about worse things, most notably the medical and surgical experiments, performed on men, women, and children, often wi
thout aesthetics.
Apparently the Nazi doctors had been trying to learn what could not be gleaned from experiments on animals – the limits of human suffering; the effects of extreme heat and cold, of starvation and sleeplessness; the possibility of survival without certain vital organs; artificial insemination; the swopping of healthy limbs; the potential for extending the human life span by medical, biological, and mental mutation – all of which meant unimaginable pain and horror for the unfortunates used... And Wilson, whether or not he had been involved directly, had not only shown an interest in the dreadful experiments, but had willingly used the people in the camps as part of his work force.
The man was a monster.
Or, as Major General McArthur had said, some kind of mutant.
Bradley shivered in his harness, then checked his wristwatch again. When he saw that he had one minute left, his stomach almost turned over.
What the hell was he doing here, with the 82nd Airborne Division, about to parachute into the darkness?
He was searching for Wilson.
He had left Nordhausen with the US 1st Army, with which he had travelled so far and seen so much action. He had gone as far as Paderborn with them, but there they had parted company, because he was intent on reaching Kiel before the Soviets took it. He had commandeered a jeep and driven himself through a landscape of appalling destruction, along roads filled with advancing Allied troops and fleeing refugees, past enormous open-air prison camps that stretched as far as the eye could see, to the town of Minden on the Weser, which had recently been occupied by the US 9th Army. There Bradley had attached himself to the British 2nd Army, which, reinforced by the US 82nd Airborne Division, was about to launch itself on the drive toward Lübeck, the doorway to Kiel.
Just before the attack was launched, Bradley had learned that a British SOE headquarters had been set up in Weser. When he paid them a visit, he found himself face to face with his old friend Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wentworth-King.
‘Kiel?’ Wentworth-King said in reply to Bradley's query. ‘Difficult to say who’ll get there first, old chap: General Montgomery’s 2nd Army, now closing in on Hamburg, the 1st Canadian Army, now closing in on Oldenburg, or the bloody 2nd White Russian Army, now spreading right along the Baltic Coast. If the Russians get there first, you won’t get your man, so you’d better move sharpish. I suggest, dear boy, if you have the heart for it, joining a contingent of your very own 82nd Airborne Division, which, to avoid our own guns, is about to parachute down just beyond Neumünster, near Kiel’s ship canal. From there, they’re hoping to fight their way into Kiel. What age did you say you are?’
Now here he was, fifty years old, preparing to jump out of this plane and parachute down into Germany... Maybe because WentworthKing had goaded him into it, the smart son of a bitch.
Goddamned Brits! he thought.
‘Hitch up!’ someone bawled. ‘Hitch up!’
The door was pulled open and an angry wind howled in. The paratroopers connected their ripcords along the length of the plane. Bradley did the same, standing up like all the rest of them, feeling shaky and not sure if he could make it, but trying to hide that fact.
With the hatch open, the noise was dreadful, a combination of rushing wind and the roaring engines and whipping canvas flaps, but the men shuffled inexorably toward the opening, taking Bradley there with them. The flight sergeant was bellowing instructions laced with obscenities – and Bradley thought he heard other noises outside, though he couldn’t be sure. The plane was shaking badly, as if about to fall apart, and he fought the urge to sit down again. Then the flight sergeant bellowed again, a man ahead shouted, the queue moved, and Bradley realized that the first man had jumped out and the others were following,
‘Jesus Christ! he whispered.
The men went out one by one, some bellowing just like the flight sergeant. Bradley swallowed, licked his lips, and wanted to be sick – and was shocked at just how loud the noise was three men away from that open hatch.
Two men.
One man.
The man disappeared through the hatchway, leaving Bradley exposed. The wind almost floored him, roaring at him, beating around him, but he stepped forward, was jerked forward – yes, the flight sergeant had grabbed him by the shoulder – and he saw his open mouth, the glint of fillings, heard him bellowing. ‘Fucking jump!’ were the words he heard as the roaring wind sucked him out.
He was swept back and up, his stomach somewhere in his throat, and saw spinning lights, maybe stars, perhaps the moon, and heard the roaring of engines and the magnified rush of wind and then plunged down. He was falling! His parachute hadn't opened! Then he was jerked up violently, a puppet on a string, and suddenly fell down a black well of silence and saw darkness around him.
Darkness? No. He was falling through clouds. He saw other figures falling all around him on the end of their parachutes. They looked ghostly in the clouds, silhouetted in a gray mist, above and below and all around him as if in a dream.
Then he dropped down below the clouds and was dazzled by dawn light.
More than that... the whole world.
Or so it seemed to him. He thought he could see its curved edge. It was actually the horizon, far away, beyond land’s end, a strip of gray stippled by rays of sunlight and spitting fountains of water. It was the Baltic Sea. The fountains of water were explosions. The sky above the sea was filled with black dots – Allied bombers – and the land, now below him, all around him, racing upward, was divided by streams and roads and endless, shifting black lines that, he realized with a shock when he saw the tracers and billowing smoke, were columns of refugees and soldiers passing each other, going in opposite directions, while the war raged about them.
The ground rushed up at Bradley as he fell down through the streaming smoke and noise of the continuing battle.
He braced himself for the landing.
Wilson saw the parachutists through his binoculars and knew they were at least an hour’s march away. He turned away from them, scanning east and west, and saw the smoke of battle in both directions as the Soviets and Allies advanced. Then he looked at the Baltic Sea beyond land’s end, a few miles away, and saw that the sky was filled with Allied bombers now pounding the port of Kiel.
‘We have to leave right now,’ he said to General Nebe. ‘I know that,’ Nebe replied. ‘We’ve already loaded the trucks. I’m taking just enough men to help us unload at the harbour and the rest are being left here to hold off the enemy.’
‘Do they know what you’re asking of them?’
‘These are SS troops. SS troops are trained to obey and take pride in doing so.’
‘Lucky us,’ Wilson said, then glanced at Ernst Stoll. The SS captain had made it back from Prague in the nick of time, bringing with him the news about Schriever and the latest troop movements. Now, because over the past few days he had actually seen what was happening, he was obviously keen to get on the move.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Wilson nodded. Stoll led them out of the bunker, away from the officers’ quarters and past the troop accommodations, along bleak concrete corridors with reinforced, low ceilings and machine-gun crews at each open window, then around the weapons room and ammunition dumps and storage huts, up the sloping ramps, and outside. There the trucks were parked in the covered, camouflaged garage, with the troops that were actually guarding them clambering up inside.
One of the trucks was special, because it carried the crate containing the remaining components of Wilson’s saucer. Wilson insisted upon riding in that, instead of in Nebe’s staff car. Shrugging, Ernst Stoll climbed in beside him, saying ‘Why not indeed?’ They sat side by side, the large wooden crate looming over them, then the trucks coughed into life and moved out in column.
‘I’ve thought about it,’ Wilson said.
‘About what?’ Ernst replied.
‘This Schriever business. The fact that he’s still alive. I don’t think it matters that much – and it may even
help us. If, after the war, Schriever starts talking about his flying saucer, it will lead everyone in his direction. They’ll check out his drawings and conclude, correctly, that the saucer he constructed was unworkable. After that, if anyone reports seeing our flying saucers, almost certainly they’ll be treated as cranks. Once that happens, we can create a smokescreen of confusion and fly our own saucers with impunity. What do you think?’
‘I think you’re right,’ Ernst said.
Wilson smiled and patted him on the shoulder. The German had lost everything in the world and now only had him.
‘Good,’ Wilson said.
The trucks travelled down to Kiel. A fine mist veiled the dawn. Aircraft growled overhead, shells exploded on land and sea, and the big guns were thundering in the east, west, and south. Wilson pressed his hand against the rocking crate and then they came to the docks.
The truck squealed to a halt. The crate shook and then was steady. General Nebe’s eyes emerged from the drifting mist and he motioned them out. Wilson clambered down first and was surprised at how dark it was. The black water reflected the lamps beaming down on the submarines. He glanced toward the warehouses. Nebe was murmuring to his troops. The men formed up in a neatly spaced line against the wall of a warehouse.
‘I’m going to take a demolition team,’ Ernst informed him, ‘and get them to lay a trip-wire across the road we’ve just come down, to blow up anything coming after us.’
‘Very good,’ Wilson said.
He almost felt proud of Stoll – this new Stoll was his own creation
– but as pride was a destructive human weakness, he concentrated elsewhere.
Some men were unloading his precious crate, slowly, with extreme care, and eventually, when they had it out of the truck, they hitched it up to a crane.
The crane started groaning.
Wilson glanced at the submarine anchored just below him: U-977. There were men on the deck, arranging themselves around the hold. Chains rattled and Wilson saw his precious crate dangling over the water. There was a moment’s hesitation. The crate jerked up, then started spinning. Hands reached up and guided it down and then it dropped out of sight.
INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1) Page 46
